Ten lessons I learned from teaching NFTs to fine art students in 2022
Dr Jessica Priebe
In my seventeen years of teaching art history in Australian universities, museums and art institutions, one topic has engaged and divided students more than any other - NFTs. It is safe to say that NFTs are as polarizing in the classroom as they are in the media. The only difference is this generation of art students knows they must embrace an understanding of emerging technologies to compete in an increasingly digital world where traditional gatekeepers are being removed and a global art community has emerged on-chain. Artists everywhere are waking up to the fact that creator royalties are now possible and that NFTs offer a new medium to explore creativity on-chain.
Even among traditional art students, there is a growing awareness of NFTs as a viable solution to authenticating works and timestamping ideation in an opaque market long plagued by forgeries. While art schools across the globe have been slow to institute a pedagogical framework around NFTs, blockchain and web3, the reality is that the graduating class of 2022 is entering a very different landscape than when they began their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree three years ago.
A Non-Fungible Education
Last year, in response to structural changes in the contemporary art market and interest amongst the student cohort, I proposed a new undergraduate course on contemporary digital art focusing on NFTs, blockchain, web3 and AI. Its purpose is to examine recent transformations in the digital art space through the lens of art history and establish a critical framework for the utility of this technology as it relates to art and museum practices. Now at the end of its second intake, the course has been an iterative journey.
Together we explored the lineages of digital art, its aesthetics and communities, along with the early pioneers that led to the NFT boom and bust. We examined the archaeology of the internet and debated theories relating to digital reproduction and post-internet art. In defining the term crypto art, we unpacked metadata, smart contracts, royalties and marketplaces. We looked at how museums have responded to NFTs and discovered the possibilities of DAOs and the metaverse. We analysed conceptually driven NFT projects that question this technology and how value is attributed to digital art and collectables. We considered the history of blockchain and its utility in the art world as it relates to authentication, digital twins, fractionalized ownership and transparency around provenance and patronage. We investigated machine learning and studied the recent developments in AI art.
The conversations in the classroom have been vibrant, instructive, and at times explosive. After a year of researching, writing, teaching, testing and listening, here are ten lessons I learned about NFT and web3 education in 2022:
1. Not everyone who takes an undergraduate course on NFTs believes in NFTs…and that’s ok.
In my experience, students generally fall into one of three categories: the passionate crypto art maxis, the well-informed misanthropes and the quiet curious middle. Naively, I assumed that the NFT and blockchain cynics would avoid the course. I didn’t anticipate that they would attend every week, read the prescribed texts and contribute with robust discussion points and nuanced arguments. Their active participation highlights the growing awareness among current BFA students of the need to explore these ideas in a safe and inclusive environment before they graduate. The sceptics may not like NFTs, but many of this cohort want to know more. Too often the opportunity to test the legitimacy of these arguments is lost outside the university sphere, buried in meetups, conferences and online NFT courses stacked with enthusiastic maxis, dedicated builders and metaverse dreamers ruminating in siloed echo chambers. If we are serious about NFT and web3 education, then early adoption is critical.
2. A digital literacy program can address knowledge gaps.
The age range of my students is typically 19 to 45, with at least 75% between 19 and 22. Approximately 10% of students reported some working knowledge of web3 or were involved in NFT projects. All had heard of crypto, but few had wallets. To address these gaps, I established the data literacy project, a collaborative online glossary of terms that relates to the course material. While the glossary is created using web2 programs, the entries are minted as an NFT collection. I found that knowledge of basic definitional terms and the potential of on-chain publishing provides students with the scaffolding that leads to better understanding.
3. Make web3 technology part of the course experience.
When I first started teaching art history, the idea of designing thematic exhibitions consisting of student-authored catalogue essays collated and uploaded to WordPress was considered relatively new and innovative. Today my students are collaborating in real time on group assignments published on-chain. Their NFT and blockchain mid-term reports demonstrating utility in the art world are being converted into data visualization models. Second semester students created AI-generated artworks that respond to the various theoretical, historical and ethical debates introduced each week (Figs. 1-4). These works serve as a visual record of class discussions and populate our metaverse gallery, custom designed by Simone Leonelli co-founder of NFTedu on arium.xyz. The students then minted this collection of 11 unique digital works during a workshop for our final class. To commemorate minting our metaverse display, we created a physical artwork from the scraps of paper containing the words used to generate the AI collection (Fig. 5). This site-specific work, which was installed at the National Art School campus (Fig. 6), shows how the practical and social application of technology can augment the learning experience and unlock a student’s intellectual and creative potential (Fig. 8).
4. Teach sustainable and economic minting practices.
Fortunately, there are now many environmentally friendly blockchains offering cheap gas fees. While The Merge of 2022 made it possible for our AI collection to be sustainably minted on Ethereum, I still find Polygon the best chain to work with in the classroom. A layer 2 solution developed on top of the Ethereum blockchain, Polygon operates via a Proof of Stake (PoS) method, minimizing energy consumption by 99%. Students are always surprised to hear that minting on Polygon requires no gas fees (hence the term ‘lazy minting’) and produces only 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions compared to approximately 55 grams generated by watching one hour of Netflix.
5. A course without community and collaboration misses many opportunities.
I have been pleasantly surprised at the deep and genuine interest from people working in the NFT and web3 space in wanting to engage with students on emerging technologies and provide mentoring through conferences, meetups and other community-led events. My students are fortunate to have benefited from guest lectures by industry leaders and artists, including recently Serwah Attafuah, who spoke to students about her experiences creating NFTs for Sotheby’s 2021 Natively Digital sale (Fig. 7). Other organizations, such as Future Art and Culture Vault have generously provided internships and passes to their conferences and events. These experiences have been formative for students in expanding their networks and exposing them to the broader NFT community, whose collegial spirit expresses itself in the web3 colloquialism #WAGMI (We’re All Going to Make It).
6. The history of digital art is essential to understanding the NFT boom.
Few students were aware of the long history of digital art, which has its roots in the kinetic sculptures of the early twentieth century. Similarly, there was little knowledge of the early experiments in computer art, video art, and net.art. Tracing the historical linages, aesthetics and politics of digital art, which has sat outside mainstream contemporary art, is fundamental to understanding the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘tokenized’ digital art.
7. Adopt a critical discourse around NFTs, blockchain and web3.
While more peer-reviewed scholarship on NFT art is needed, a growing number of insightful scholarly contributions are coming from the digital art and NFT space. The articles, videos and podcasts my students connected with included those by Christiane Paul, Jason Bailey, Alex Estorick, Tina Rivers Ryan and Primavera de Filippi (to name a few). Likewise, there is a need to engage with scholarship from a pre-NFT era to frame the current debates around digital reproduction and the concept of digital scarcity. To this end, my students explored Walter Benjamin’s theories of aura and authenticity outlined in his famous essay from 1936, alongside Douglas Davis’s rethinking of Benjamin’s ideas in the burgeoning digital era of the mid-1990s. They also considered an NFT’s ability to create a record of an original copy as a challenge to postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, where society cannot differentiate between the real and the unreal. Such exercises aim to contextualize the current paradigm, seed new ideas and generate demand for critical theory in the NFT space.
8. Focus on conceptual NFT art projects.
Much of the conversation on NFT art and digital collectables now focuses on historic PFP projects. While recording the history of NFTs is valuable, we need to adopt a post-NFT lens when analyzing the current landscape. Just as post-internet art critiques our networked society, NFT art has evolved to a point where new works are in dialogue with historical projects. In my experience, the most effective way to teach NFT art is to analyze conceptual works that engage with the technology as its subject and medium to explore its potential or question our methods for assigning value. Once students learned to identify conceptual NFT art from historic jpegs on the blockchain, they recognized the potential for creativity in this space.
9. Not all artists need to learn how to write smart contracts.
While Rhea Myers treats smart contracts as a medium to explore ideas around artistic nomination and the participatory aesthetics of art on-chain, we mustn’t burden artists with the added responsibility of writing their own contracts. I learned that simply showing students how to assign royalties when setting up their collection on OpenSea was beneficial. Likewise, I encouraged students to seek out NFT white papers to understand the role of technology partners. More than one student observed the similarities between current NFT art + tech collaborations and those of the pioneering EAT collective of the 1960s and 1970s, which brought computer engineers from Bell Labs together with artists, composers and choreographers to produce avant-garde programs and events.
10. Mentoring student NFT projects.
While only 6% of students across the two semesters reported any prior minting experience, over half began experimenting with NFTs during the course. Some minted collections on Opensea and Foundation, while others created conceptually driven projects aimed at curated NFT art platforms like Culture Vault, White Cubeless and Nifty Gateway. Many students expressed concern about the vetting process for curated platforms, citing the need for alternative options aimed at emerging artists with limited name recognition. To this end, art schools and institutions should be actively thinking about how to support student-led projects that explore art and creativity on-chain. Likewise, competitions and awards that follow in the footsteps of the Lumen Prize for art and technology (now with its own NFT category) and the M H Carnegie Fine Art NFT Fellowship Award go a long way towards supporting student initiatives and raising awareness around NFT education.
Conclusion
I believe that fostering literacy around the utility of NFTs, blockchain, and web3 is essential in creative education. However, this space is still in its infancy, and the conversations around what constitutes a quality NFT education are only now taking shape. Whatever direction it takes, ensuring that NFT courses are open, independent and taught using web3 technology must be a priority for higher education. This is not only critical to student learning, but it has the potential to be a point of differentiation from the current offering of online NFT education courses.
As for the next intake, I plan to set up a Discord server for alumni and community engagement and expand our metaverse user experience through live-streamed lectures and message boards. I am partnering with technology companies, such as espresso, who are supporting students working at the bleeding edge of art and technology. I am also exploring options around issuing POAPS for class attendance and Education NFTs upon course completion. While the opportunities for this course are wide ranging and the format interchangeable, one thing remains clear - a student’s NFT education must remain non-fungible.
Dr Jessica Priebe is an Art Historian and Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at the National Art School, Australia. She is the author of François Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2021) and co-founder together with Simone Leonelli of NFTedu, an education platform and creative agency providing universities, schools and institutions with integrated strategic advice and support around the development and delivery of a web3 enabled curriculum, NFT projects, metaverse design, publishing on-chain, minting services and blockchain solutions.
Date :30.11.2022.Author: Dr Jessica Priebe.